Plant pests (e.g. fungal pathogens, bacteria, nematodes, insects, viruses, etc.) cause major losses of food and fiber throughout the world, especially in developing countries. Losses include direct production or pre-harvest losses, postharvest and storage losses, and the diminution of food quality and safety (e.g. by production of mycotoxins). Other resultant losses from plant pests are observed in plants valued for aesthetic, olfactory, or ecologic properties.
Plant pests can sometimes be controlled by application of chemicals (e.g. fungicides, insecticides, nematicides, parasiticidals), manipulation or management of the microenvironment or by genes for resistance to the pathogen.
Discovery and introduction of a “new” gene for resistance frequently causes the development or selection of a new race of the pathogen able to infect plants containing that “new” gene. This has best been demonstrated by the rusts and smuts of cereal crops, but it also occurs with soil borne diseases such as black shank of tobacco and root and stem rot of soybean, caused by Phytophthora nicotianae and P. sojae, respectively. There are at least two races of P. nicotianae and more than 70 races of P. sojae, all requiring different genes or combinations of genes for disease resistance.
The fungal genus Phytophthora comprises many species of very destructive pathogens which cause serious diseases of plants. These include blights, damping-offs, cankers, fruit rots, root rots, wilts, and many other symptoms that affect a wide variety of food, fiber and oil crops including avocado, cacao, canola, citrus, pepper, potato, soybean, tobacco, tomato, pine, rubber, oak trees, etc.
In the past decade the phenomenon of gene silencing or RNA interference (RNAi) has been described and characterized in organisms as diverse as plants, fungi, nematodes, hydra and humans (Zamore and Haley, 2005). It is considered to be an ancient defense mechanism wherein the host organism recognizes as foreign a double-stranded RNA molecule and hydrolyzes it. The resulting hydrolysis products are small RNA fragments of 21-30 nucleotides in length, called small interfering RNAs (siRNAs). The siRNAs then diffuse or are carried throughout the host, where they hybridize to the mRNA for that specific gene and cause its hydrolysis to produce more siRNAs. This process is repeated each time the siRNA hybridizes to its homologous mRNA, effectively preventing that mRNA from being translated, and thus “silencing” the expression of that specific gene.
Fire et al. (2003) describe a method of administering RNA to a host wherein the RNA is composed of sense and antisense sequences homologous to a gene of that host cell to silence that host cell's gene. See U.S. Pat. No. 6,506,559.
Results by van West et al. (1999) demonstrated internuclear gene silencing in Phytophthora infestans. They transformed P. infestans with the inf1 elicitin gene in both the sense and antisense orientations. This resulted in silencing of both of the transgenes, as well as the endogenous gene. By somatic fusion of a silenced transgenic strain and a wild-type strain, they demonstrated two essential points; first, that the presence of the transgene itself is not necessary to maintain the silenced state; and second, the involvement of a trans-acting factor capable of transferring the silencing signal between nuclei, later found to be the siRNAs.
Waterhouse et al. (WO9953050A1) have described methods of conferring viral resistance to a plant by transforming the plant with a gene silencing construct directed towards a plant viral gene.
Wang et al. (US20030180945A1) describe a method of gene silencing in a fungus by providing the fungus with a gene silencing construct directed towards a fungal gene.
What is needed in the art is a plant resistance method that is readily adaptable to changes in the biological environment such as a new and serious plant disease. For example, there were no occurrences of Asian rust in soybean in the USA until November 2004. Asian rust is predicted to cause losses estimated at 1 to 7 billion dollars (USDA) in 2005-2006.
The art would also be substantially advanced if there existed a versatile genetic method of conferring resistance to a plant against a spectrum of fungi, insects, nematodes, bacteria, etc.